Sorting documents and mail pieces manually is laborious and time consuming. For example, thousands of large organizations employ numerous people full-time to manually sort and deliver incoming and interoffice mail and documents. For instance, a large company may receive 5,000 mail pieces that need to be sorted and delivered each day to different departments and/or individuals. Such volumes require a significant number of employees dedicated to sorting and delivering the mail. Nonetheless, such volume is not typically sufficient to justify the expense of traditional automated sorting equipment, which is quite expensive. Additionally, the mail for such organizations is typically quite diverse, which makes it more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to automate the sorting procedures.
Various systems for sorting have been developed to address the needs of mail rooms for large organizations. However, the known systems suffer from several problems; the most significant are cost and size. Accordingly, there is a need for a compact and affordable automated sorting system that is able to meet the needs of mid- to large-sized organization that handle several thousand mail pieces each day.
Similarly, may large organizations have extensive storage areas in which numerous items are stored. Sorting and retrieving items from the hundreds or thousands of storage areas requires significant labor to perform manually, and the known systems of automatically handling the materials are either very expensive or have limitations that hamper their effectiveness. Accordingly, there is a need in a variety of material handling applications for automatically storing and/or retrieving items.